Rose plaiting guide

If you follow me on Instagram or the blog's Facebook page, you'll have seen this photo before a couple of weeks ago when I was helping out at a family friend's wedding photoshoot. It was SO much fun, I really enjoy being a groom and making the horse look perfect - I think the perfectionist side of me was in full force that day! 👰🏼💍🌸

The final look!

Using real roses worked the best with doing dutch braid style plaits and then sewing AND using rubber bands to secure the roses. Anyone looking for a good dutch braid plaiting guide should read this one by Austen from Guinea For A Guinness! This guide was the one that gave me the confidence to try out the fluffy dutch style instead of my normal button plaits.

Things you need to have in your plaiting kit are a sewing needle (with a big enough eye) waxed thread, plaiting bands, small but pointy scissors (pointy ones are VERY useful for cutting the braids open with very little effort and with least risk to the mane) a mane comb, water and sponge. A comb will help you to space braids so you can get each one to be the same width, and instead of using a sponge to wet the mane, you could you use a product like Quick Braid (from HorseHealth) to help you get that perfect ‘grip’ to hair when plaiting. It's not slick like hair gel and not sticky like hairspray, and helps to keep those little pieces of hair down instead of sticking out!

The main thing I found out with using real roses was that the bigger the individual plait, the better it looked with the rose, as the 'hood' of the plait gave a really nice shape to it. The best way to get the roses to stay on was to sew them into the actual bud of the hooded plait and once it felt like the rose was secure enough, then to use 2 or 3 rubber bands to secure the stem of the rose to the plait too. Using rubber bands was the most difficult bit because the roses are just so delicate that you really couldn't be too rough or they would look terrible (thank god I practised this the weekend beforehand.) Also I didn't put roses on the smallest plaits because there was no chance that they were going to stay on a horse like this who would shake his head all the time... 🙄 Which is why after two shakes I took the roses off as they were looking a bit worse for wear! 

I also did a really quick French braid into the horse's tail which I then changed into a normal plait and then at the end I added a single rosebud 🌹The horse was too pissed off after me faffing around him for 2 hours to let me do a proper french plait the entire way down, so I did just enough so that you could see the plait and the rose in the photos! I didn't really fancy getting kicked and he DONE with the me at this stage.

Both photos are from Waris-Wörlin Photography who did an amazing job once again.

What do you think? Do you like these?